Did you know that Mayfield Middle School has a cup stacking club?  Mrs. Miller advises the club, which was started last year by two seventh-grade girls, Sarah Carlile and Ilana Miller.

Cup stacking is a sport where competitors, either as a team or as an individual, stack plastic cups in a specific style or sequence in as little time as possible.  These sequences are mostly pyramids with three, six, or ten cups.

Mrs. Miller says that her daughter Ilana and her friend Sarah inspired her to start the club. According to Mrs. Miller, Sarah and Ilana really enjoyed cup stacking and wanted to share what they like to do.

Ilana started cup stacking the summer before sixth grade when her mom brought home a set full of cups. “I had seen people cup stack on TV and it looked really interesting so I decided I wanted to try it myself. At first I was really slow. As I practiced more and more, I got faster and faster,” she says.

Sarah joined in when Ilana got her first set and found out that she wasn’t that good. “I was awful!” Sarah said. Then about a year later, she went over Ilana’s house again and to try again. They ended up stacking for five or six hours that day, and both knew this would be something they would really get into.

“A little while later, we decided to start a club because we thought other people might like it too,” Ilana says.

The club started off with thirty kids participating and the word went around. Sarah said, “The first day came around and it was just my friend and me stacking with our sets and all of a sudden the whole room filled with people. It all just kind of fell into place after that.”

During practice, stackers can work on improving their times for any style they want. The club performs and participates in competitions. Sarah preformed for the Dream Team talent show, and the club participated in Stack Up, the World Sport Stacking Association’s yearly attempt at breaking the Guinness World Record mark for “Most People Sport Stacking at Multiple Locations in One Day.”

According to Sarah and Ilana, there are different cup stacking styles. The 3-3-3 is three pyramids with three cups in each. The 3-6-3 is a pyramid of three cups, then a pyramid of six cups, then another stack of three cups. There are also stacking styles called freestyles. Freestyles are styles of stacking that are just for fun, not styles that are used in competitions. There are a variety of different freestyles, such as the cyclone, shuffle, and the nine-stack.

Stacking times vary depending on the type of style a competitor is doing.  How do our MMS members stack up?  Sarah’s fastest time for the 3-3-3 is 2.9 seconds.  For the 3-6-3, her personal best is 3.4 seconds, and for The Cycle, 10.03 seconds.  She adds, “In competitions they have a certain way of ranking you based on time, and according to those rankings, I’m in the highest class.”  Ilana’s performance is comparable. “For the cycle, my record is 9.917 seconds.  For the 3-3-3, I think my record is around 3 seconds, and for the 3-6-3 it’s just under 4 seconds,” she explains. In cup stacking, winners can be determined by thousandths of seconds.

According to Wikipedia, cup stacking started when a man named Wayne Godient was working for the Boys & Girls Club of Oceanside, California. When the children he was working with got tired of playing traditional sports, he took paper cups and asked them to stack the cups as fast as they could.  The cups used today for sport stacking aren’t regular cups; they are specially designed with holes at the top of them to allow air to come out. This prevents the cups from sticking together and also allows the competitors to go faster.

Do you want to learn how to speed stack? Here is one of the three most popular styles:

The cycle starts with three stacks arranged 3-6-3, which get built into three pyramids. Then, down stack (take down) the 3-6-3 pyramids and make two pyramids of six cups each. After that, down stack the cups into one pile. Take two cups off of the top and put them on either side with one of the cups turned upside down. In between the two cups, use the rest of the cups to make a pyramid of ten cups. Lastly, down stack the cups into the initial piles of 3, 6, and 3.  Sound complicated?  The world record is under six seconds (click for video)!

“The goal and purpose of the club is to have fun. It gives people a chance who perhaps aren’t good at typical sports a chance to do something sport related,” says Mrs. Miller. The club is still accepting members. If you would like to join, find Mrs. Miller in room 101. Meetings are in the classroom during lunch or advisory.